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D. Bykov A fool is a fool. Well, in general, they achieved their goal – fools make up the majority. I have never lived in a society where fools make up the majority, and this, I must say, is a completely new, even revolutionary experience. Some will argue that it has always been this way, that fools have always made up nine-tenths of any community, and I myself have written about this, but I never meant the population as a whole. I am talking about that very one-tenth, which is considered the thinking part of society: it reads, writes, goes to the movies, follows politics and comments on it. At different times, Russia produced various goods of varying quality: machines, tanks, cars, sincere loyalists, snitches, dissidents, emigrants (this article of Russian export is particularly successful with us), and all of this went somewhere, moved, aroused great interest. Modern Russia produces almost exclusively fools, but in industrial quantities, exceeding any demand. These fools predominate in all spheres of Russian life, including the intellectual one. In the opposition, by the way, they are also in the majority, so the constant and monotonous criticism of this very opposition is, I must say, a bit tiresome. Even during the Belarus situation, it became clear that the situation could not be otherwise: where power is catastrophically degenerating, the opposition also becomes foolish. If you want a different opposition, one that you are not ashamed to support, let's start by changing the government, but you don't want that. Then your own idiocy will become obvious. Does anyone, except an idiot, ask what your positive program is to people who are removing a dead horse from the road? Their positive program is that there is no dead horse, and they are asked why they are striving for power. They are not striving for power; their function is hygienic; they are just a little more sensitive to the smell of a dead horse, that's all; but they cannot explain this either, being fools. Sensitivity to smells does not yet mean intelligence. The signs of a fool are numerous, but let's focus on the essential ones. First, a fool is inclined to discuss obvious things seriously, that is, to question the axioms of the society in which he lives. Some will argue (oh, they always argue with me! Instead of listening to the end), that Lobachevsky also questioned the axioms of Euclid; excellent, I will say, let's abolish the flat world of Euclid and create another one, and then we will question all the axioms; but you don't want that! You want to live in a post-industrial world and at the same time hotly argue about the national question; you want to travel freely abroad and yearn for Stalin; you want prosperity and still hate freedom! Fools argue about whether Jews are good or bad, whether Russians are better than everyone else, whether it is necessary to believe in God, and whether all foreigners should be expelled from the capital, and they do not understand that this is not being discussed, because it is not the Middle Ages and it is not Saudi Arabia. Secondly, a fool does not know how to argue. In an argument, he is only interested in dominance, and the argument for him is only an attack on the person, and the point of view of the opponent is determined only by inherent, innate characteristics: he lives abroad (or in the Russian province), he is a Jew (a Cossack), he raises children (a cat). The fact that one can be a Jew, live in the province and raise children, or be a Cossack living abroad and raise a cat, does not fit into the mind of a fool. He thinks in patterns. Thirdly, a fool is not able to look at the process outside the established context: for a liberal fool, the USSR is unequivocally bad and contains nothing progressive; for a totalitarian fool, everyone who lived in the USSR after Stalin was destroying the great empire. Fourthly, a fool reads very little. He doesn't know much in general, but reading is difficult for him in principle: "I won't read this and I won't," "Let the p...s read this," "I'd rather read so-and-so" (usually a close friend or neighbor, most often a regular on stikhi.ru). Fifthly, a fool is almost always a conspiracy theorist. He does not believe in the course of events, but he firmly believes in world conspiracies: "the twins were blown up by Bush, Yeltsin is a Freemason, the Anglo-Saxons are interfering with Putin." Most of the theories developed by fools are irrefutable precisely because it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a world conspiracy. A fool does not know what Popper's criterion is. In his head, it cannot fit the thought that only a falsifiable theory can be true or false – everything else is not a theory, but a walrus's dick, which is completely irrefutable in its obviousness and simplicity. Sixthly, a fool never sees himself from the outside. He is not capable of self-irony, but that's okay; most fools are monomaniacs and lose all criticality when they get carried away with their hobby. You can even communicate with them, but only until the conversation turns to Jews, pedophiles, or elves. Why there are so many fools is a complex question: the easiest thing to say is that they are produced by Putin's leadership, which is interested in ease of management. And this is even logical, like any theory of a fool. In fact, this is a multi-factor process, and these factors are the eternal curse of non-fools! – knowledgeable people call many; from global warming to the universal spread of the Internet. The fact is that the thinking part of Russia has for the first time degraded to such an extent that discussions in this environment have become impossible, predictions about the future are meaningless, and endless repetitions of banalities and excesses have turned into a norm. No circle of high school students, no combat group of terrorists, no company of drunken officials looks so hopeless, stupid, and aggressive. A natural question arises: why? We often think about the purposes of God, but we have not yet found an answer to Burns' question: the Lord is, of course, right in everything, but it seems incomprehensible why he created a sturdy cabinet with such a miserable contents. We don't know the ultimate purpose of creation, but somehow we liked to think that one of its possible purposes is progress. However, what is it like to imagine that regression is no less important, that without it we may not feel the proper humility, that every Renaissance must be preceded by dark ages? Or maybe the point is not in the Renaissance at all, and the fool has such a powerful compensatory mechanism that we don't even dream of? Perhaps this is an irrational intuition, amazing physical perfection, or the ability to slow down progress? After all, Leonov predicted in "Pyramid" that humanity is doomed to degradation, otherwise it will destroy itself and the world? It seems that in this environment of total and growing meaninglessness, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain an optimistic view of things (optimism is not a sign of a fool – a fool is optimistic only about himself, and he usually predicts doom for the world; the fact that fools will also perish if the world perishes does not occur to them). However, there is something truly inspiring in all this: there is a point of view that the Lord is not interested in our affairs at all – he is interested in our souls, which we must return, according to Kushner, "dying in the best possible way." Tsvetaeva wrote about this – you, she told Bessarabov, are wasting yourself on small good deeds for unkind people who will not appreciate them, but you need to work on your soul, there is no other meaning in anything! This is an egoistic, but sane view of things. I don't know what our souls are for – maybe it's scary to think that they are for ourselves, because with a cultivated soul, a person has an easier time – but the only thing that makes sense to do, in my opinion, is to develop, harden, polish, and perform other useful manipulations with one's own soul. So, I say, there is an opinion that one of the sharpest, most subtle, and strongest tools that process this soul is life in the time of fools, without any prospects, with a feeling of complete historical impasse. It must be admitted that the sword is tempered not only in fire but also in shit.